I guess it was just a talking point to shit on Apple’s approach?
I don’t care anyway. Here everyone uses WhatsApp so RCS is not important but just an outsider observation.
It started with Apple promoting the "green bubble = inferior" thing. Google responded by insisting the iMessage experience with Android was only bad because Apple refused to support RCS. Now here we are.
The RCS protocol is much better than SMS/MMS. But there are also plenty of better protocols out there. Both can be true.
But, when RCS works, it works well. The stupid compatibility hacks Google and Samsung and everyone else implemented to make SMS/MMS pretend to be good at group messaging (like the ways they indicate emoji reactions) no longer need to be encoded in human-readable form.
The encrypted component of RCS was a Google special and I think everyone knew that. People wanted Apple to immediately take up Google's encryption spec, but Apple waited for the GSMA spec to be updated with E2EE which is a much cleaner solution.
The opponents of RCS have a point; using RCS is a bit like using your ISP's email servers in that the quality of your ISP determines how good of a time you'll behaving with it.
There are also many advantages to full RCS support that nobody seems to have implemented yet. Things like video calls, or sending money over text. No longer needing third party services like FaceTime or WhatsApp to do video calls is a step in the right direction in my book.
Apple is not a sports team. What people are shitting on is a vendor-specific messaging app. It would be the same if there was a Samsung chat.